Editor’s note:Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures at research and technology development organization SRI International, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He is co-founder of Siri, and more than 30 other ventures.

I am frequently asked what SRI International thinks about the explosion of incubators in the United States and abroad and how our approach to creating new ventures compares.

SRI has one of the longest and best track records creating new technologies and innovations, and we have formed more than 50 new ventures in the last 20 years. But we’re also known for taking a contrarian position on some of the ideas about incubation, commercialization and innovation. Our greatest successes, such as the founding of companies Nuance, Intuitive Surgical, Orchid Biosciences, and Siri prove our mettle. We’ve had our share of failures, too.

What have we learned over more than 65 years of invention and commercialization? How can one create the greatest amount of value possible in a new company? There are several specific ways in which our venture processes stand in contrast to what is in vogue today. These are lessons that anyone in the business of innovation should consider.

A Great Venture Has Strong Core Beliefs

A few key traits identify a great venture in the making. SRI does not restrict the markets it considers for ventures, having created successful ventures in information technologies, biotechnologies, health, materials, clean tech, green tech, education, and more. Our process, however, is similar for all these ventures.

To even consider a venture, we require a strong value proposition that starts with a large and growing market, a disruptive technology solution, and an outstanding team. Usually we look to create a venture with a potential market capitalization of $500 million to $1 billion or more.

Ventures are all about a product or service’s ultimate success in the market. That’s simple enough, right? Technology is seldom a product or service in and of itself. I cannot emphasize that enough. Creating a company based on technology is very risky. Don’t be tempted by pure technology and forget to make it accountable to market dynamics.

The allure of absolute value invention is still strong in Silicon Valley and beyond. It takes an enormous amount of discipline to hold steadfastly to a notion of technology as valuable only in the proper context, outside of which it loses purpose. Hitting home runs too often results in a narrow focus on the technological.

So, if we don’t start with technology, how do we come up with the venture concept in the first place? In truth, there’s no set formula, and that’s okay. Ideas can come from technologists, business teams, or entrepreneurs.

Regardless of the point of origin, we develop a specific hypothesis about a market opportunity and seek a disruptive technology solution. Siri is a good example: We were looking for a way for consumers to access web services with zero clicks, because we knew that web services were losing 20 percent of their customers with every click. Reducing clicks become our mantra. How could we reduce mobile clicks to zero?

Siri’s natural language understanding technology was one piece of a solution to that well-defined and clearly stated goal.

Sometimes we do have a breakthrough technology on our hands and seek to find a market pain point for which the technology might help create a solution. That approach however, only succeeds if we are very careful not to think of technology alone as sufficient to start a venture. We have to put blinders on and invoke the same discipline described above. It is essential that we determine and validate a market opportunity for a product or service before proceeding, no matter how exciting the breakthrough.

Regardless, as the pace of technological change quickens, certain things are still timeless. This venture-formation rubric is one of them.

Technology

SRI forms only three to four startups a year, whereas the typical incubator might create dozens of companies or more. But our hit rate has been sufficient to return tremendous value to SRI and our partners.

This is a different model from incubators that use large numbers to try to meet their return on investment. Many of the ventures that graduate from incubators are innovative only in their marketing or time-to-market. Some have disruptive business models, but very few of the graduates are based on breakthrough technology. Without breakthrough technology, you have to cast wide nets and play the numbers.

At SRI, we do have one particular advantage worth noting. Often the underlying technology behind our ventures at SRI has been developed over decades, with hundreds of millions of dollars of government funding. This is the source of our core technology. The government is often willing to invest in the kinds of projects whose speculative nature and long duration wouldn’t typically make sense for corporate or venture capitalist investment. DARPA is a superb example of a government organization dedicated to creating breakthrough technology.

And because of the Bayh-Dole Act, non-profit government contractors such as SRI retain all commercial rights to the work done for the government. This role of the government in R&D is crucial to the success of the venture. It provides non-dilutive funding and advances the venture to the point at which venture funding is possible.

Of course it’s also immensely beneficial to the government, because it leads to companies and industries from which the government can purchase products at costs that are orders of magnitude less than if the government attempted to fund them alone. And it’s important to innovation in the U.S.

Our Teams

When SRI begins to create a venture, we almost always recruit an executive team from outside SRI – entrepreneurs-in-residence, because we seek teams that are proven leaders, have deep market domain expertise, and have the skill to recruit and lead teams in the commercial marketplace.

We first form a venture concept or hypothesis ourselves, though we’re open to ideas from all sources – inside and outside SRI. Once that concept reaches a level of internal validation, we engage with one or more EIRs, whether they found us or we found them, who have proven experience and leadership in that market and technology domain. We recognize that SRI may have leading technologists, but they have usually spent their lives in research and development – not in a commercial environment.

Other EIR programs are often more open-ended. They are essentially a free office, a modest salary, and first-dibs for the sponsoring party on whatever new venture might emerge. Those individuals are encouraged to explore different ideas and modify them if and whenever needed.

Incubators on the other hand develop both entrepreneurs and their concepts simultaneously. Very often it is said that an incubator is investing in the team above all else. SRI is unique in that we focus on creating and validating venture concepts, and then build teams around those concepts.

Paul Graham actually does a version of what I’m describing with his Requests For Startups, which makes great reading. Paul is brilliant.

One cannot assume that some of the youngest (if some of the brightest) minds in tech will naturally arrive at the best or most interesting market opportunities on their own. Directives like Graham’s “Kill Hollywood” are not venture concepts per se, but they’re inspiring, and they point towards a methodology we employ at SRI.

Time Frame

Most new ventures from incubators are incubated from three to six months. This might be a good timeframe for ventures that are light on technology, but if a venture is to disrupt an industry and have deep technology solutions, it will need more time, which will ultimately provide an advantage. Usually it takes 9 to 12 months to build the team and the value proposition, and to draw upon the resources of SRI to create at least a demonstrable version of the technology.

In fact, we don’t consider our concepts to be a “venture” at all until they officially spin out (which means they also have VC funding). Along the way, we look for a lot of reasons to say no. We think a decision not to proceed is a virtue. And we’re willing to spend considerable time and money to find out if a venture concept is well founded.

We don’t have a mandate to cycle companies through at any particular pace, or in any particular quantity. Also, if we determine that a concept is not venturable, it is very likely that it can be licensed to established corporations.

Investment

Investment is another area in which we cut against the grain. SRI limits what we will fund. We are a nonprofit research institute whose purpose is making the world a better place through scientific discovery and the application of technology. While this can mean that we miss opportunities, we understand and play to our strengths, and we prefer bigger bets on a smaller number of ventures.

The typical incubator invests $20K to $50K of seed funding. Follow-on investment from angels and seed funds at or after a demo presentation is therefore critical. This small amount of initial funding is only enough to get started, parlaying a good idea into something discussable.

We often invest $200K to $400K in SRI spinoffs, to take them that last mile of commercialization. We fund the 9 to 12 months that we expect the venture will need before raising additional funds at an attractive valuation. This funding is not for continued research and development of the technology. It is for EIR salaries, value proposition development, market validation, and demos and prototypes.

Almost all SRI ventures develop a demo or prototype to demonstrate that we indeed have developed a technology solution and have mitigated the technology risk.

To be clear, many ventures then develop their market-ready software or hardware entirely from scratch, only using the SRI software or hardware as a guide. This is because SRI technologists and scientists have largely focused their efforts on research and development (algorithms, for example) – not on prototypes or production-ready products robust enough for end users.

Some R&D organizations spend a great deal on continued R&D for their ventures. SRI’s principle is that since tens to hundreds of millions of dollars (usually of government funding) have already been spent on developing the technology, our own internal funding would be a drop in the bucket. So if additional R&D is needed, no venture is considered.

Summary

We believe that having different, simultaneous approaches to new-company formation will continue to contribute to innovation and a robust economy nationwide. Our model has allowed us to also bring technology breakthroughs to the marketplace, rather than have them conclude as R&D projects.

As we strive to create great value from technology, we hope that others may learn from our successes and failures alike. We don’t propose to know all of the answers, but we do think that certain methods and principles increase your chances significantly. It is absolutely possible to greatly increase the probability of creating successful new ventures if you have the requisite clarity and discipline.

Editor’s note:Dan Portillo joined Greylock Partners as vice president of Talent in 2011. John Schmocker is on the Greylock Talent team and works closely with portfolio companies to help them build out their core engineering teams.

Talent makes or breaks a company, particularly a new one that’s just finding its feet. Landing the right engineer on your team can make all the difference; likewise, missing out on the UI/UX talent you need can be devastating.

Finding, attracting, and retaining top talent is at the top of the to-do list for any ambitious startup. Building your team is an essential pillar of building your company, and it often requires expertise that’s outside the comfort zone of a founding team. It’s essential for startups to find help where they need it: identifying the right talent and great sources of talent (not just candidates, but also recruiters and recruiting agencies), implementing and managing the recruiting process, selling and closing great candidates and on-boarding them effectively.

The Core Talent team at Greylock focuses on technical talent for our portfolio companies. We focus on introducing great talent to the portfolio and help to create strong recruiting machines inside those companies. We continuously interact with the talent marketplace – what companies are looking for, as well as what’s most appealing to the strongest candidates. Below are a few trends we anticipate for 2013, but keep in mind that the dynamics are constantly in flux, especially in technical arenas.

1) High-Demand Skills

The skills in highest demand in 2013 are those from developers with expertise in fast-growing platforms and environments, including: iOS, Android, Scala, Node.js and full-stack Python developers with experience building applications that scale well.

In enterprise environments, it can be especially difficult to find engineers that love deep technical challenges. For consumer applications, look for candidates adept at a high velocity iteration of code.

2) Roles To Fill

Some of the toughest roles to fill will be those that didn’t really exist a year or two ago. These roles include:

Big-data analysts and developers who can build appropriate data infrastructure and algorithms that efficiently analyze and leverage that data

Growth hackers or growth engineers that can drive viral features within a product (which is increasingly becoming just as important in the enterprise as it is in the consumer market)

UI developers who know how to design and code for enterprise environments

Not only are experienced candidates tough to find, but it may be difficult to assess the candidates you do find. Even the best candidates won’t have as deep a track record in these areas as you’re accustomed to since they won’t have been at it for very long.

3) Quantitative Analysis

A knack for quantitative analysis may once have been a plus in roles outside the engineering team (such as marketing and communications), but in 2013 most, if not all, functions will require quantitative skills. Introducing quantitative skills into functions that currently don’t focus there is a major challenge. It takes time and requires some creativity. Kickstart a new quantitative function with stars from other areas in the company. Get your data scientist to introduce candidates and interview other candidates. Don’t underestimate the challenge.

4) What Makes You A Draw?

What will make you a compelling draw for top talent? Here are some attributes that we see the best talent drawn to:

Small (10 people or fewer) companies with compelling founders and executives

Interesting and well-articulated engineering challenges

The opportunity to make an impact – the sooner the better

A demonstrably compatible culture and organizational mission

A convenient and desirable location

5) Entice Your Recruits

You can’t be sure the prospects you want will accept your offer, but you can boost the odds by bringing your A-game, and the right mindset, to the recruiting process. Don’t forget: You’re selling every prospect on your company just as much as they’re marketing themselves to you. Are you grilling them on their past accomplishments before you’ve got them gung-ho at the prospect of working for your company – and for you?

Here’s one more tip for your 2013 recruiting strategy: Stay on top of the recruiting landscape. The most effective strategies and the crucial insights are a constantly moving target. After all, last year’s recruiting strategy and tactics are … well, so last year.

The Burj Khalifa is the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722ft, or 829.8m. It is the most visible symbol of the transformation the oil-state of Dubai has been undergoing in the last 20 years. Artificial islands, massive skyscrapers, and expansive fields of grass in the desert — all these things are visible in a new interactive panorama taken from the top of the Burj Khalifa.

The full image is 2.6GB in size and contains an astounding amount of detail. The image is composed of 70 individual photos amounting to 2.5 gigapixels in total. 48 of the shots were panoramic images taken with a tripod. Photographer Gerald Donovan then took 22 manual shots to fill in the gaps left after all the panoramas were stitched together.

Not only can you spin around to look at all the nearby objects, but you can zoom way, way in on distant buildings and curiously well-maintained green spaces. There are even construction cranes cranking away on new skyscrapers in the image.

You can pan around by clicking and dragging, and the mouse wheel will let you control the zoom level. It’s going to take a second or two for the image to snap to the full resolution whenever you pan or zoom. Sadly, this is all built in Flash, so it won’t work on a mobile device and some slower PCs might have issues, too. If you;re on a slower connection, the data load is worth the wait when you first fire up the panorama.

Today, Google added the Grand Canyon to its armchair-explorer service, Google Maps‘ Street View. The addition doesn’t just show one trail that has been singled out, but contains over 75 miles of trails and surrounding roads.

Google notes some famous portions of the Canyon are available to explore from the safety of your desk chair and air conditioner, such as the South Kaibab trail, Meteor Crater, and Bright Angel Trail. Of course, the imagery is present in a full 360 degrees so you can get a real sense of your virtual surroundings.

Unlike the Street View of your neighborhood though, Google couldn’t send one of their famous cars driving along the Grand Canyon to map it, so they sent actual people in on foot to explore, using an Android-powered backpack called the Trekky.

The backpack weighs 40 pounds, and is strapped to a person in the employ of Google whose literal job is to go on a hike for the good of the Internet. The Trekky is powered by Android (you’re guess is as good as ours as to what version), and contains 15 lenses that are angled in various directions so it can take images that can be connected to one another in order to form one coherent 360-degree panorama. The Trekky’s cameras snap pictures every 2.5 seconds as the hiker walks around.

You can take a look at it in action below.

Altogether, the end result of the mapping is 9,500 panoramic images of the Canyon available for your perusal so long as you have access to a web browser and an Internet connection.

Western training of Syrian rebels is under way in Jordan in an effort to strengthen secular elements in the opposition as a bulwark against Islamic extremism, and to begin building security forces to maintain order in the event of Bashar al-Assad’s fall.

Jordanian security sources say the training effort is led by the US, but involves British and French instructors.

The UK Ministry of Defence denied any British soldiers were providing direct military training to the rebels, though a small number of personnel, including special forces teams, have been in the country training the Jordanian military.

But the Guardian has been told that UK intelligence teams are giving the rebels logistical and other advice in some form.

British officials have made it clear that they believe new EU rules have now given the UK the green light to start providing military training for rebel fighters with the aim of containing the spread of chaos and extremism in areas outside the Syrian regime’s control.

According to European and Jordanian sources the western training in Jordan has been going on since last year and is focused on senior Syrian army officers who defected.

“As is normal, before any major decision is taken on this issue, the preparations are made so that when that decision is taken, everything is in place for it to go smoothly. That is what these groups [special forces] do. They go in in advance,” a European diplomat said.

A Jordanian source familiar with the training operations said: “It’s the Americans, Brits and French with some of the Syrian generals who defected. But we’re not talking about a huge operation.”

He added that there had so far been no “green light” for the rebel forces being trained to be sent into Syria. But they would be deployed if there were signs of a complete collapse of public services in the southern Syrian city of Daraa, which could trigger a million more Syrians seeking refuge in Jordan, which is reeling under the strain of accommodating the 320,000 who have already sought shelter there.

The aim of sending western-trained rebels over the border would be to create a safe area for refugees on the Syrian side of the border, to prevent chaos and to provide a counterweight to al-Qaida-linked extremists who have become a powerful force in the north.

British officials say new European guidelines on the Syrian arms embargo, formally adopted by the EU at the beginning of March, allow military training as long as the ultimate aim of that training is “the protection of civilians”.

Paris takes an identical view of the EU rules.

Officials in Brussels say the language of the guidelines is less than clear-cut. “It’s deliberately hazy,” said one. “When it comes to technical assistance, what it means in practice depends on who you ask. The Brits and the French, for example, are much more forward-leaning than others. The principle is that the assistance should be for the protection of civilians, but as we saw in Libya, that can be interpreted in different ways.”

British officials argue that training of Syrian forces to fill the security vacuum as the Assad regime collapses would be help safeguard civilian lives.

William Hague, the foreign minister, outlined the goals of such training on Wednesday.

“Such technical assistance can include assistance, advice and training on how to maintain security in areas no longer controlled by the regime, on co-ordination between civilian and military councils, on how to protect civilians and minimise the risks to them, and how to maintain security during a transition,” he told parliament. “We will now provide such assistance, advice and training.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “It’s not the sort of thing we are going into too much detail on right now. We are big on the transition picture, because at some point Assad is going to fall, and the opposition are going to need help to provide governance in areas they control, and that of course includes security. But security doesn’t just mean fighting, it also means basic law and order, and policing.”

The Pentagon said last October that a small group of US special forces and military planners had been to Jordan during the summer to help the country prepare for the possibility of Syrian use of chemical weapons and train selected rebel fighters.

That planning cell, which was housed at the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Centre in the north of the capital, Amman, has since been expanded to co-ordinate a more ambitious training programme. But Jordanian sources said the actual training was being carried out at more remote sites, with recent US reports saying it was being led by the CIA.

For the first two years of the Syrian civil war, Jordan has sought to stay out of the fray, fearing a backlash from Damascus and an influx of extremists that would destabilise the precariously balanced kingdom.

“What has happened of late is that there has been a tactical shift,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, a Middle East expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank. “Islamist forces have been gaining steam in the north and Jordan is keen to avoid that in the south. Having been very hands-off, they now see that they have to do something in the south.”

He added: “There is a feeling that Jordan simply can’t handle a huge new influx of refugees so the idea would be to create a safe zone inside Syria. For them it’s a no-win scenario. Everything they had been seeking to avoid has come to pass.”

For western and Saudi backers of the opposition, Jordan has become a preferable option through which to channel aid than Turkey. Ankara has been criticised for allowing extremist groups, such as the al-Nusra Front, become dominant on the northern front while it focused on what it sees as the growing threat of Kurdish secessionism.

“The Americans now trust us more than the Turks, because with the Turks everything is about gaining leverage for action against the Kurds,” said a Jordanian source familiar with official thinking in Amman.

The US has announced an extra $60m ( 40.2m) in direct aid to the rebels, including military rations and medical kits. Asked on Tuesday whether assistance included military training, the US state department spokesman Pat Ventrell replied: “I really don’t have anything for you on that. Our policy has been non-lethal assistance.”

Earlier this week, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said Washington was now confident that arms supplies to the rebels would not be diverted to extremists. “There is a very clear ability now in the Syrian opposition to make certain that what goes to the moderate, legitimate opposition is, in fact, getting to them, and the indication is that they are increasing their pressure as a result of that,” he said.

Syrian rebels have said that in the past few months there had been a relaxation of the previously strict US rules on what kinds of weapons were allowed across the border, and that portable anti-aircraft missiles had been released from Turkish warehouses where they had been impounded.

Matt Schroeder, who tracks the spread of such weapons for the Federation of American Scientists, said the recent appearance of modern, sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles in the hands of such fragmented rebel groups was deeply troubling in view of their capacity to bring down civilian airlines.

“This is a step above anything we’ve seen before in the hands of non-state actors,” he said. “This is a new and unfortunate chapter in recent manpad [man-portable air-defence] proliferation.”

You might think all flashlights are created equal, but don’t tell that to a flashaholic. There are large online communities of flashlight aficionados who take their illumination very seriously, and there’s a good chance even they’ll be impressed by LED Lenser’s new F1 which manages to squeeze a whopping 400 lumens from a single CR123 battery.

It’s true that CR123 batteries aren’t as easy to find in stores as regular old AAs, but it’s a fair trade-off. What you sacrifice in convenience, you gain in longer runtimes and greater illumination. CR123 batteries use a lithium-cell inside instead of alkaline, and output three volts instead of the 1.5 volts from a AA battery. So it allows flashlights like the F1 to blast an impressive 400 lumens while still boasting excellent battery life.

Of course you don’t have to run the F1 at full power. You can extend its battery life even further by dimming its LED bulb to its lowest setting. But if you’re going to drop $80 on it, you might as well go big or go home. [LED Lenser]